Today We Celebrate Our Mothers

Call to Worship

One: Today we celebrate our mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and all the women who have loved us.

Many: Thank you God for giving us mothers.

One: We remember with deep gratitude all the ways they demonstrated their love for us.

Many: Sometimes we did not understand them, but we know that God understood.

One: We take time to remember our mothers because a mother's love is most like God's love.

All: For their tears, for their hugs, for their wisdom, for their unfailing trust in our abilities, we give thanks today.

Opening Prayer

Loving God, we know your love because we have mothers.
We thank you for the mothers who carried us in their wombs, nourishing, protecting, and bringing us into the world.
We thank you for the mothers who did not give birth to us, yet loved us just the same.
With gratitude we remember their words of encouragement when we have felt unsure or afraid;
we thank you for their kindness when the world has treated us unkindly;
we thank you for their soft, comforting arms and the gentle way they kissed away our tears;
we thank you that they protected us with the fierceness of a lioness protecting her cubs;
we thank you for the times when they corrected us rather than letting us continue down wrong paths.
Help us to live so that their investment in us might not be in vain.
We honor our mothers with lives of service to you in the name of the Risen Christ, for it is in his Name we pray. Amen.

Offering Prayer

Dear Lord, out of your great love for us you have provided for our needs.
There is food for our tables, clothes to cover us, a roof over our heads and someone to love us.
For these gifts we are grateful.
Bless now, our tithes and offerings, we ask, so that they may be used to make disciples for Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Rev. Dr. LaGretta Bjorn is the pastor of the United Methodist Church of Spring Valley in Spring Valley, New York, and is a clergy member of the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church.